


out in rain

by uraa



Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: M/M, Post-Game(s), theres very slight mikleo/zaveid but its so small that i didnt want to put it in the ship tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 19:06:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7280962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uraa/pseuds/uraa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it aches, angry and fierce. But only sometimes.</p><p>(a collection of snippets, post-game, mikleo/sormik-centric)</p>
            </blockquote>





	out in rain

**Author's Note:**

> I have been one acquainted with the night.  
> I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.  
> I have outwalked the furthest city light.  
> \- Robert Frost
> 
> to cheer myself up i tried to imagine that mikleo's time while sorey was sleeping wasn't so bad.

What’s it like, knowing someone your whole life, and then suddenly they’re gone?

 

 

It doesn’t make sense. Sorey makes him happy. So when Sorey is gone, he should feel sad.

 

 

The first night is more numb than anything. But it gets better.

 

 

There’s no one to explore ruins with. It’s quieter. Thoughts bounce around in his head instead of out loud. There’s something missing, not bad, really, but different.

 

 

He gets used to working alone.

 

 

Sorey used to define his limit. Competing against Sorey used to be the standard he held himself to. Now he pushes himself as hard as he thinks he can take and wonders how it would compare.

 

 

Evenings are stiller, too. The bed feels strange without another body but one person is enough to warm it. He adds another blanket in the winter and hardly feels the weight.

 

 

Muse’s staff is difficult to adjust to at first, but a couple of decades in and he feels like he’s used it his entire life.

 

 

Sometimes he wants to talk about ideas for his book, or about a bit of archeology he’s been puzzling over. Lailah and Alisha will listen but don’t really understand. Edna will make fun of him. Rose tries her best but gets impatient in the end. Zaveid doesn’t really seem to care. He writes it down instead and puzzles it out on paper. It’s different, slower, imbued with less energy. But it gets the job done.

 

 

(He can’t bring himself to talk out loud to an empty room.)

 

 

Sometimes he craves touch. But there’s the inconvenience of having to get to know someone, or feeling awkward with a stranger, so he never seems to take any action. Zaveid offered, once, but he was drunk and he’s probably forgotten by now.

 

 

At some point he starts keeping a little book. It doesn’t have a title, but he thinks of it as Sorey’s, and occasionally he adds to it. It’s a slim volume, originally, and he thinks that he will have barely filled it up by the time Sorey wakes.

 

 

It multiplies to two, and then three, and then an ever-growing stack bound by a faded bit of ribbon that Edna gave him.

 

 

Years pass and he learns to find it normal that his face stays the same as it always was.

 

 

He’s not lonely. He’s surrounded by people and there are so many things to do and he has friends.

 

 

Sometimes it aches, angry and fierce. But only sometimes.

 

 

Rose and Alisha are growing older and it makes him feel strange, to see his youthfulness next to their aging. Rose teases him about it but he can tell that she’s bothered by it too.

 

 

Sometimes he goes and sits with Sorey, although it isn’t often. The longest he’s spent there is only a couple hours, and he always seems to leave feeling worse than when he arrived.

 

 

He hardly remembers some years. Others, he can recount almost every day of.

 

 

Rose goes first. He attends her funeral in blacks and grays and the shock he feels is mirrored in all of her friends’ faces. He hopes she enjoys seeing Dezel again.

 

 

Alisha goes next, a few years later, and this time it is not so shocking. He sits with Lailah and Edna and Zaveid afterwards and it is very quiet. It stays quiet, with them gone.

 

 

One day he finds a spare pair of Sorey’s earrings. It’s growing easier and easier to forget that he is waiting for someone, so he puts them on and is reminded every time he feels them brush against his neck.

 

 

Lailah sees him wearing them and gives him a little sad smile. He feels a little guilty because he’s not wearing them because he misses him, and he’s not in mourning. He doesn’t need her pity. Years later he realizes that it was she who might have been the one hurting.

 

 

Year two hundred and he still doesn’t miss Sorey, not really. Sometimes he wishes he were here, but mostly he’s learned to live alone. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as he thought it would.

 

 

Hair grows fast when you have all the time in the world. At one point he lets it grow until it brushes the back of his knees, but it’s heavy, so he chops it off to his ears and starts again.

 

 

He starts keeping a garden, but it either grows too slow or too fast for him to keep up. He can’t bear to let the plants die, so he gives them to Edna.

 

 

They don’t talk much about when Sorey was a shepherd, unless it comes up. Sometimes people ask and Lailah guides the conversation gently away.

 

 

He finished his book sometime in his first century, but now he comes back to it, and revises until it’s nearly written over.

 

 

Eventually people stop catching sight of the earrings and giving him pitying glances. Eventually it’s only a legend that Shepherd Sorey wore feathered earrings at all.

 

 

There’s not much of anyone left to talk about Sorey without putting “Shepherd” before his name.

 

 

One of Rose’s great grandchildren finds him one day, when she’s still a child. He knows by the eyes. He coaxes up her natural resonance until she can see him. He watches her grow into adulthood and then she moves away to the other side of the continent.

 

 

He saves her once, when he senses her on the edge of his domain and goes to say hello. She watches him wipe the hellion blood from his staff with reverence and looks at him like he’s an angel. It makes him uncomfortable.

 

 

He does not see her again until she’s on her deathbed. That is a quiet funeral as well.

 

 

Year four hundred and the world is starting to look stale. He spends nearly half a century exploring and charting ruins in various caves, and when he comes out Lailah and Edna greet him with acceptance and ease. Zaveid is there too. They all get drunk.

 

 

Zaveid had not forgotten his offer to him, so long ago.

 

 

Intimacy is strange after nearly five hundred years of celibacy.

 

 

Somehow he doesn’t remember much of the time between years five hundred and five hundred and fifty. He’s busy. They’re pushing closer to their goal, closer to purifying the continent, and that’s really all he can see.

 

 

Zaveid gets a dog and he wonders if he did it just to spite him. The dog can barely tell who’s feeding it, anyway.

 

 

He breaks and sleeps by Sorey one particularly rough night. The next morning he’s nothing but stiff and achy and cold.

 

 

Year six hundred and the little pangs start to kick up again. He hasn’t felt like this since he was eighteen, but he’s still not lonely, exactly.

 

 

There are plenty of people he can find to talk to about archeology but they aren’t Sorey.

 

 

Sometimes he tries to imagine the exact shade of green of Sorey’s eyes. He has no idea how close he is to being right.

 

 

He breaks and reads through Sorey’s books. What trivial things he had written about in his first century! Things like, _the sky was so blue today, just how you like it,_ and _you were right about that ruin north of Elysia,_ and _Edna found some old swords she thinks you’d like._ The entries get farther and farther apart until they peter out completely.

 

 

Mikleo sits himself down and touches pen to the bound pages for the first time in almost fifty years. There’s not enough room to record all that’s happened, so he just writes, _I still miss you._

 

 

Edna’s ribbon on the journals frays and breaks, so he finds a new one. It looks wrong.

 

 

Year six hundred and twenty three he has a vivid dream of Sorey. He can hear him so clearly then but when he wakes up he can’t recall what his voice sounded like.

 

 

It takes him a few minutes to realize that he’s crying. That’s odd.

 

 

Zaveid and Lailah and Edna and him have a four-way battle and it’s the most fun he’s had in years. They walk back to town caked in baked mud and everyone gawks at the sight of them.

 

 

He’s been there for so many births and weddings and deaths that he’s honestly not sure how to differentiate them.

 

 

None of them can seem to remember how Alisha’s funeral went.

 

 

He spends an hour one night lost in imagining the slide of Sorey’s skin against his.

 

 

He has to struggle to keep Sorey from becoming a romanticized fantasy in his mind. He did not exist simply to hold Mikleo as he fell asleep. He did not exist simply so Mikleo would have someone to kiss. He did not exist simply to help Mikleo generate new theories about ruins, or keep him company in the middle of the night, or help him make breakfast every morning.

 

 

Waiting for your best friend/lover/soulmate for six hundred years seems romantic, but of course it’s not, not really.

 

 

He decides to grow his hair out again after centuries of keeping it short. Some important chancellor cautions him about looking too much like a woman. He considers wearing a dress to the next important party they attend out of spite, but Lailah reminds him that he’s six hundred years old and he eventually relents.

 

 

There’s a strange sort of bond that has been growing between him and Edna. She braids flowers through his hair, and they look like tiny stars.

 

 

It’s year six hundred and eighty four, and by now he’s learned to let the years pass in a blink of an eye. But there’s a strange sort of restlessness pacing inside of him that insists on dragging the days out endlessly.

 

 

Everyone seems fixated on his hair.

 

 

Year six hundred and ninety. Somehow the past six years seem the equivalent of his entire fifth century.

 

 

Year six hundred and ninety two and he’s honestly doing alright.

 

 

Year six hundred and ninety five and he’s built up an impressive tolerance to alcohol. It takes nearly a gallon of ale get all four of them drunk now.

 

 

At some point the lonely pangs come back, redoubled. He wonders why he can’t sleep at night until he realizes that it’s because Sorey’s arms aren’t around him.

 

 

He wonders if he could grow facial hair if he tried. It takes about a week to show and it’s _blue_ and he gets rid of it immediately.

 

 

He’s not sure if it’s some sixth sense giving him the feeling that they’re getting close, or if it’s just his lonely repressed self, desperate for relief.

 

 

He has another dream about Sorey and wakes up in a cold sweat. Lailah and Edna are staying over, and they don’t say a word when he stumbles into the kitchen and falls heavily into a chair.

 

 

A few days later Sorey’s light blinks out.

 

 

The blessing has returned but it doesn’t mean that Sorey is awake.

 

 

Mikleo knows by now that waiting where he sleeps won’t do any good. It could be another century, even.

 

 

He lingers nearby, despite himself. He’s uncomfortable with Sorey waking up entirely alone.

 

 

To his delight, he discovers a ruin very close by. He thought he had discovered nearly every one on the continent by now, but the entrance was well hidden and he had been avoiding the general vicinity, anyway. It gives him something to do.

 

 

It seems to be dedicated to fire and water and it’s the biggest mystery he’s come across in years. It’s also one of the most beautiful ruins he’s ever seen.

 

 

There is a hand on his wrist and he could have saved himself from the fall but he knows who it is.

 

 

He does not cry.

 

 

Sorey marvels at his hair and it feels so good to hold him again.

 

 

The chatter between them springs up surprisingly easily. The galaxy hasn’t shifted but it feels marginally more right.

 

 

Sorey goes quiet at the sight of his earrings. Mikleo smiles and says that he can take those off, now.

 

 

Lailah gives Sorey the fiercest embrace and tries not to cry. Mikleo realizes faintly that he’s happy.

 

 

No, he was happy before. He’s happier.

 

 

Sorey begins to ask where Alisha and Rose are, but stops himself.

 

 

They all seem to realize at the same time that Sorey is still seventeen and he thinks with a slight rushing sensation that it won’t be the same.

 

 

Sorey thinks the rocks in Elysia have gotten shorter. They launch into a heated discussion about dating ruins through their wear and it feels like he can breathe again.

 

 

When they’re sitting at home he has to remember to take the extra blanket off the bed.

 

 

He can give Sorey his journals later.

 

 

“How was it without me?” asks Sorey quietly, his arm curled around Mikleo’s shoulder, right as he is about to fall asleep. His breath tickles Mikleo’s hair.

 

  
Mikleo is tired and he almost doesn’t answer.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu at @ agenasu.tumblr.com


End file.
